A Quote by Ewan McGregor

I think it's quite tricky for actors to release albums. It's difficult, because I'm an actor, you know, I'm not a musician. I love singing, but I don't have a big repertoire of songs that I've written; I mean, I've got a few, but nothing that I could fill an album with, and I don't want to do it just for the sake of it.
I find the fact that so few people buy albums to be strangely emancipating. There's absolutely no reason for 99% of musicians making albums to think about actually selling albums. So as a musician you can just make an album for the love of making albums.
When I finally stopped [singing], he had been saying, like, the last day or so, he'd been saying, now, I think we should put this one in the album. So without him saying I want to record you and release an album, he kept - he started saying, let's put this one in the album. So the album, this big question, you know, began to take form, take shape. And Rick [Rubin] and I would weed out the songs.
To create an album of love, I really had - I thought it was going to be easy, because I've always written love songs. But I thought if I really want to make a love album that contributes, that actually means something, I've got to go deep.
I had just made this album called 'Mind Blow,' a CD-R release on Spirit of Orr. This was in 2003. Quite a few of the songs from 'Was Dead' were actually on that.
I like albums where all the songs are written in one go. If you're trying to create the number-one album with the best songs ever, I get why you'd want to write for three years and pick the best ones, but for me, I'd rather hear a group of songs that are all expressing a state, or time of your life. I think it's more that.
But I always held my music up and protected it from compromise. So I just do it for my friends. I've written hundreds of songs, and I'm sure I have a few albums worth of songs.
There's a little bit of gospel in everything I do. But I don't know if I will ever do a gospel album. There's a big universe out here, and I don't want to just sing to the church. I want to sing to the world and bring them a message of love. I love going to church and singing gospel songs, but right now there's a message that the world needs.
I really love crafting albums and thinking of albums as a whole, not just individual songs or singles or just tracks, but a whole entire album.
I have a repertoire of songs that I'm proud of, that I've written for my own band. When I do a cover, something that somebody else has written, I think about it very carefully before I sing that song. I have to really get behind it and understand it and like it. And that's how I pick roles. I don't want to play just anything.
There are albums that I listen to religiously just because I'm such a big fan: any Bruce Springsteen album, or old George Strait albums because the songwriting's so strong.
The great thing about albums is it gives you a lot of choices, and we can all say that the album business is dead, but watch Taylor Swift. I don't think it's dead. I just think we've got to hit on the energies that make people want to collect albums.
I think it’s because there's quite a few of us now but because we’re less frequent than American actors - because Hollywood is the place to be for actors - and there's just a big rush when an Australian comes over just because there's less of them. I guess that's just how it is. Like if you pick a pink jellybean out of a jar of green ones it’d be amazing, but if you pick a green one, no one will care.
I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs.
I know people who have written big hit country songs that are really kind of terrible songs, but for the rest of their life, they're the guy who wrote that. You've got to be careful; if you don't want that to happen, don't write those songs.
I've always covered some Dylan songs. I do one or two. And I do them because they're great songs. You know some people cover songs they wish they could have written, not me. I like to cover songs I know I could not have ever written.
I just wanted to release an album of piano music for music's sake. I'm not expecting to sell millions of albums. It's was just nice to be able to sit down at an acoustic piano and make some music.
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